Darrel O'Pry wrote:
Much of which the renderingAPI can accomplish. There are some really cool things in CCK such as field groups that provide a basic demonstration of how the layout can be manipulated through a UI, and CCK's handlers which can be translated to the renderAPI via the #theme or as a custom element type.
Rendering more content using drupal_render give us more access to manipulate the output through _alter and #whatever callbacks we choose to create in the rendering pipeline. The problem with drupal_render currently is we're limiting it to generating node bodies. This is a highly nestable API... I'm not sure why we aren't rendering pages using this as a starting point and having new renderAPI element type like 'page', 'section', 'block', 'container', 'node'...
What's interesting is that in my vision, CCK's UI basically goes away, replaced by a more global one. CCK just ends up adding stuff to that UI. And I still have my doubts that the drupal_render() stuff will be transparent enough for themers to use. I worry, very strongly, that this path is going to make it so that only developers can theme nodes.